How a Appalling Sexual Assault and Killing Investigation Was Resolved – 58 Years Later.
In the summer of 2023, a major crime review officer, was tasked by her supervisor to “take a look at” the Louisa Dunne case. The victim was a 75-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered in her home city home in June 1967. She was a mother, a grandmother, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a center of civic engagement. By 1967, she was living alone, having lost two husbands but still a well-known figure in her Easton neighbourhood.
There were no one who saw anything to her killing, and the police investigation found few leads apart from a handprint on a back window. Officers canvassed 8,000 doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no identification was found. The case stayed open.
“When I saw that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through forensics, so I went to the storage facility to look at the evidence containers,” says the officer.
She found a trio. “I opened the first and closed it again right away. Most of our unsolved investigations are in sterile evidence bags with barcodes. These weren’t. They just had old paper tags indicating what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern forensic examinations.”
The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and listing what they had. And then nothing more happened for another nearly a year. Smith pauses and tries to be tactful. “I was quite excited, but it did not generate a huge amount of enthusiasm. Let’s just say there was some scepticism as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a high-priority matter.”
It sounds like the beginning of a crime novel, or the premiere of a investigative series. The end result also seems the material for a story. In June, a nonagenarian, the defendant, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.
A Record-Breaking Investigation
Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running unsolved investigation closed in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the globe. Later that year, the unit won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels remarkable to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”
For Smith, cases like this are proof that she made the correct professional decision. “My father believed policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than resolving a 58-year-old murder?”
Smith joined the police when she was 24 because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was interested in people, in assisting them when they were in distress.” Her previous role in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a crime review officer, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”
Examining the Evidence
Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a compact team set up to look at cold cases – homicides, rapes, disappearances – and also review live cases with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and relocating them to a new secure storage facility.
“The case documents had started in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they moved several times before finally coming here,” says Smith.
Those boxes, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new senior investigating officer arrived to lead the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an aerospace engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his professional journey.
“Cracking cases that are hard to solve – that’s my analytical approach – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an obvious decision. Why wouldn’t we try?”
The Key Discovery
In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back quickly. In real life, the testing procedure and testing take many months. “The laboratory scientists are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take precedence.”
It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a message that forensics had a full DNA profile of the assailant from the victim’s skirt. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the genetic registry – and it was someone who was still alive!”
The suspect was ninety-two, a widower, and living in another city. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the time to waste,” says Smith. “It was all hands on deck.” In the period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the thousands original statements and records.
For a while, it was like navigating two time periods. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an the victim’s home in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they describe people. Nowadays, it would usually be different. There are so many changes over time.”
Understanding the Victim
Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “She was such a prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her outside her home every day. She was widowed twice, separated from her family, but she wasn’t reclusive. She had a group of women who used to meet and gossip – and those were the women who realised something was very wrong.”
Most of the team’s days were spent analyzing documents. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make great TV.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, now eighty-nine, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every particular from that day,” says Smith. “He said: ‘In my career all my life and seen a lot of dead bodies but that’s the only one that had been murdered. That stays with you.’”
A History of Crimes
Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little doubt of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in 1977 he had pleaded guilty to raping two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ disturbing statements from that previous case gave some idea into the victim’s last moments.
“He threatened to strangle one and he threatened to smother the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women resisted. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he appealed, supported by a mental health professional who stated that Headley was not behaving normally. “It went from a life sentence to a shorter term,” says Smith.
Closing the Case
Smith was present at Headley’s arrest. “I knew what he looked like, I knew he was going to be 92, and I also knew how compelling the proof was,” she says. The team were concerned that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.
Yet everything was able to go ahead. The trial took place, and the victim’s granddaughter had been contacted by family liaison. “Mary had believed it was never going to be resolved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a sense of shame about the nature of the crime.
“Sexual assault is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many older women would ever tell anyone this had happened?”
Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would never be released. He would die in prison.
A Lasting Impact
For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels distinct, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very reactive. With this case you’re proactive, the pressure is only from yourself. It began with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that evidence – and I was able to follow it right until the conclusion.”
She is confident that it won’t be the last resolution. There are approximately one hundred and thirty unsolved investigations in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have a number of murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly sending things to forensics and pursuing other lines of inquiry. We’ll be forever opening boxes.”
